I’ve taken risks as a matter of principle, both in life and with my fiction. I feel it’s the way to get the most out of life. And love. And art, for that matter. I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of macho Hemingway figure. I could only bungee jump to save my life, and I hate killing anything. On principle I will only kill what attacks me in my own house! Even then, I can usually rely on a cat for the real dirty work. When it comes to killing snakes, for instance, it’s best to let the cat go about her business quickly and efficiently! And keeping cats is essentially the same as encouraging Al Capone to make every day Valentine’s Day, but there you go. Moral ambiguity is what I’m all about.
JC: So this is how Elric thinks? How your Eternal Champion sees the world?
MM: Different champions see the world differently. Elric is Elric. Von Bek is von Bek. Jerry Cornelius is Jerry Cornelius. Colonel Pyat is Colonel Pyat. Joseph Kiss is Joseph Kiss. Dennis Dover is Dennis Dover. Yet, of course, they are all aspects of the same hero because they are all aspects of myself. What else could they be? They are the closest you can come to immortality. It’s quicker, easier, cheaper and a whole lot more efficient than cloning yourself. Elric knows greater confusion than any of the others. Corum sort of knows where he stands and knows that there are good and bad human beings. He marries one, after all. Elric also has relationships with human women. And, as we learn in this new book, he has progeny!
JC: Why do women like Elric so much? He seems an unlikely character to appeal to them.
MM: Someone said that there’s a bit of every woman that likes a moody cad—especially if he’s safely in a book like Mr. Rochester. Elric came out of much the same romantic background as Mr. R! He has his origins in the great Gothic heroes I admired as a youth—Melmoth the Wanderer and so on. He also has an element of monumental self-pity, and I don’t know a woman who doesn’t find that appealing in a man. They get tired of it after a while, but at first they mistake it for sensitivity . . . until they realize it is total self-absorption. I don’t claim Elric’s entirely like that. In fact, it’s fair to say that in this book he becomes deeply absorbed in someone else. But we all know guys who have the same fatal fascination. Sensible women enjoy him between the covers (of a book). I mean, Elric wouldn’t make the most reliable husband, as his wife found out! Strong, bad magic, as people used to say of the likes of Byron. “They’ll give themselves up to the darkness and danger . . .” as Kris Kristofferson puts it (rather better in this case than Byron). And let’s face it, you can’t get much more literally self-destructive in the end than Elric.
JC: Is he your “dark side,” your own self-destructive side?
MM: He must be, since I don’t otherwise seem to have much of a dark side or a self-destructive side. In real life I’m more the reliable husband type! I do have a full-size Raven Blade (Stormbringer) in my broom closet, and it does have runes engraved in it (thanks to Raven Armory, who produced it), but so far it hasn’t turned on me.
You know, I’m not entirely sure that Elric is self-destructive. He wants to survive. He’s just not prepared to survive on any terms. That’s pretty much the same as I feel. Conan is a barbarian, surviving at all costs, for instance. It’s a celebration of brute life force struggling almost mindlessly for existence against subtle danger. Struggling actually against civilization in many stories. Howard reflects the dysfunctional philistinism still evident in a lot of Texans! Elric is the creation of a Londoner, enjoying perhaps the richest and most varied cultural life in modern times. So Elric comes from a long line of civilized aristocrats, and he is a genius—he’s a sorcerer of genius. He’s an intellectual surviving as intellectuals have often had to survive in a brute world. But he’d rather be reading and thinking and making love than fighting! Our times define us. Look at Gilles de Rais, the great defender of Jean D’Arc, but more commonly remembered as Bluebeard.
Our history is full of soldier-poets, of scholar-swordsmen, of dueling playwrights! Of alchemists who had to pack whatever heat was available to them. At a distance, admittedly, Sydney, Marlowe, Cervantes and Cyrano all seem very romantic figures. For all we know they were quarrelsome buggers who took it out on drinking companions when word-blocked or evicted by their landlord or girlfriend. Perhaps they were more like Mailer than Malvolio? But Elric doesn’t set much store by his own skills. He isn’t even sure that survival is always worth the cost to the soul or to the world around him. Self-respect is important, and that means judging yourself by the highest standards in your society. You don’t judge your manhood or your courage by bodies counted, enemies or lovers.
I admit that in private I can find myself weeping with the sheer weight of human brutality in the world, but so far I haven’t been defeated by it. People always seem surprised I’m basically a cheerful and optimistic person with a liking for pets and even, occasionally, small children. I always used to feel guilty, during my fin-de-siècle phase when I read a lot of tubercular Edwardians, that I was so healthy and had so little angst. The strange thing is that I understood about angst, about the eternal abyss and so forth, but decided that life was too short for it—unless some character was struggling with it to dramatic effect. Some of us are just naturally cheerful survivors. I don’t think there’s much that’s self-destructive or self-hating about me, though I do have all the moral questions Elric and von Bek are inclined to ask themselves.
I don’t dream much, for instance, and when I do it’s very prosaic dreams about not finding the right corn flakes in the supermarket or the Number Eleven bus being ten minutes late. It could be that all the anxiety and terror in me goes on the page. I must admit I know screen villains and writers of violent thrillers who are total pussycats in real life. They can murder some poor human being in a dozen horrible ways on the TV or the page and then go out and help old ladies cross streets or tend to some hurt animal. Crime mythology is full of serial killers leaving thousand dollar bills for the orphans and going out of their way to help sick puppies. Cop mythology has a sort of reverse version. In other words, we’re none of us perfect but we all have a will towards some kind of perfection. Which is what lies in most of us, apparently, and it is that lack of absolutes—the fact that in different circumstances we can behave very differently—which fascinates me.
Of course there are some very wicked people in the world, people who enjoy inflicting pain, people who are addicted to power and don’t care how they maintain their addiction, just as there are some saintly individuals, but by and large we are both devils and angels and it is how we balance those elements in ourselves which helps determine the quality of our lives. And the quality of life of those we share the planet with! It’s the ambiguity of human character which fascinates me. Gaynor the Damned, in The Dreamthief’s Daughter , could as easily have been a hero.
JC: As it fascinated Joseph Conrad, whom you’ve written about. He was forever taking the civilized man and putting him in uncivilizing circumstances to see how he would react. He changed the names and circumstances of his characters, whereas you’re inclined to put the same characters in wildly different situations.
MM: I hasten to say my fantastic romances are more ambitious than most, but they don’t have the seriousness or indeed genius of Conrad. I realized early on that really you only write about a few characters. Why change the names if you don’t have to? You can continue the exploration of a character through a whole series of very different scenarios. You can do it ambitiously and emphatically or you can make it an incidental theme. You can do this both symbolically and, as it were, actually. You can invent a cosmology to explain it and develop it. Then your characters can move readily between a piece of realistic fiction to a fantasy story and not notice the difference. That’s only what I did in the Jerry Cornelius novels and something like Breakfast in the Ruins. The Eternal Champion is just a different way of doing that.
Conrad remains the best. He showed us, even more successfully than Stevenson, how to combine action with moral and philosophical discussion without los
ing sight of the drama. Though Victory , not Heart of Darkness, should be the first book of Conrad’s anyone encounters. One is brilliant. The other is muddy, if more easily described in extra-literary terms and so a boon to schoolteachers unable to discuss the literary qualities but happy to spout some sentimentality about the beastly Belgians in the Congo.
JC: Back to Elric and the new book. It seems to be going down very well with those who have read it so far. Yet I think it’s fair to say most prolific writers of series would have run out of steam by now and be, at best, repeating their old tricks. How do you keep life in the old albino dog?
MM: What gives Stormbringer its momentum, its specific sense of tension, is, I believe, the fact that I hardly knew where I was going with it. I was making up rules for myself as I went along. Those rules became formalized in later books, but in that one I was winging it a lot of the time. In rock and roll you sometimes let the instrument take over. As with Stormbringer, it sometimes feels as if the instrument has taken on a life of its own, is inventing progressions for you. You also sound better if your voice isn’t quite up to the song, musically speaking. Some people deliberately set their mikes high so they have to strain towards them—anything to give the song the right tensions, the right qualities.
With a book you have to set yourself a harder task than last time—you have to aim for something which isn’t in your familiar range. So you pick a challenging subject and you offer yourself some challenging technical problems and you trust yourself enough to jump in and try to solve them! In the case of The Dreamthief’s Daughter , part of the challenging subject was how to deal with what some people see as the fascistic/authoritarian elements in the genre itself. So I took that head on. Some years ago, in conversation, Norman Spinrad and I had talked over the idea of Hitler being a sword and sorcery writer, since so much of the genre might have been written by members of the Gestalt Polizei. Norman wrote Hitler’s sword and sorcery novel as The Iron Dream which, I’m glad to say, is currently back in print in English and has always been hugely successful in France and Germany, perhaps where the implications are more immediately understood.
I decided to take on the Nazi hierarchy more directly, since I know them all so well from my research into my Holocaust series about Colonel Pyat (Byzantium Endures, etc.). I had already introduced the theme in the DC graphic novel Multiverse. In that I have an albino von Bek thwarting Hitler by a peculiar, roundabout ruse. Again the story was based on my own very close research. I haven’t read any other books on Hitler or his times which have done this kind of research. I have a habit of using mostly contemporary accounts, mostly by disaffected Nazis who wrote before 1938. There were plenty of people telling what was actually going on in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t a story the public in general wanted to hear just then. . . .
The Dreamthief’s Daughter is also about dreaming, in several different meanings and interpretations. It’s about personal responsibility, too. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a profound work of philosophy. It’s a fantasy adventure story. The book has plenty of action, but its underlying argument is given in the early chapters where von Bek and Prince Gaynor are in conflict. Gaynor offers cynical arguments for joining the Nazis, von Bek offers moral arguments for not joining. Von Bek’s life and his problems begin to echo those of Elric, and you’ll see how I’ve married those two themes so that one reflects the other. There’s a lot about twins, mirrors, reverse images and so on.
I’m not saying you have to follow these themes and arguments. They aren’t necessary for your enjoyment of the book! They are, if you like, the invisible foundations of the roller coaster. But they’re an extra dimension should you want one. Anyway, by introducing Elric as von Bek’s doppelganger, I can let Elric experience the modern world and von Bek experience something of Elric’s world, with both men existing in the same body through large parts of the book. Obviously, it’s a challenge to make this work properly for the reader. Those are simply a couple of ways of keeping the tensions, of keeping you turning the pages, if you like.
JC: So there are serious messages in the Elric books?
MM: Only if you want to find them. And I wouldn’t call them messages. They are themes not usually found in supernatural adventure stories. If they do nothing else, they give a sense of substance to the story you’re reading.
The main job of the book is to help you pass your time enjoyably and without a sense of having wasted it! You might even find the book worth another read at some time in the future. If you are already an Elric reader, The Dreamthief’s Daughter will, if you like, offer further insights into his character and background and expand the Elric world. There is more about dragons, more about the war between Chaos and Law, more about Gaynor, more about Tanelorn and so on.
The book is fast-paced and there are lots of new marvels. But you don’t have to have read another Elric book to enjoy it. If you do read more after this one, you should find that your knowledge of the character expands, but no book depends upon another. Each book that I write is designed to be read completely independently. It is an independent reflection, if you like, of a common multiverse. If you choose to read others, the multiverse grows accordingly. Since I am writing in the context of the multiverse I suspect that the reader gets a sense of it, even though it is often only there by implication. Each book is a further exploration of the multiverse. The Dreamthief’s Daughter develops and clarifies ideas from other Elric books, but you don’t need to know a thing about those books. You could start this book and soon know all you needed to know about Elric, von Bek and the various worlds they visit.
JC: So is Elric still you?
MM: Absolutely. So is von Bek! So is Jerry Cornelius. They will retire when they have no more stories to tell me. I feel that all my characters come to me when they have new stories to tell—so the new book is Elric deciding he has a new story to tell! And this Elric, because he is also me, has matured. Ironically, he’s matured since his death! So I had to find a way to reflect that maturity and at the same time not have Elric step out of character. The solution I came up with both satisfies my sense of Elric being a version of myself and my need to provide as galloping good a read as people tell me Stormbringer was!
I hope I’ve expanded the saga without thinning it in any way. I have some feeling that it’s an energetic book that won’t let reader expectations down. I still feel pretty lively after some forty-five years as a professional writer. To be honest, I feel pretty much in my prime. I don’t think it’s an illusion, judging from the reactions I’ve had, but I seem to have hit a high point! It’s a bit of a relief, because you’re always afraid in my position that you might burn out and not be able to deliver any longer. I tell myself that not every prolific writer automatically burns out. P.G. Wodehouse didn’t start losing his edge until he was over ninety. King and Pratchett are still producing lively tales. All are natural storytellers. It’s something God gives you. You become a sort of conduit. An embellisher. Every tale you tell seems to spawn another, very much like the branches of the multiversal tree!
I honestly believe we formalize society and make it sane through our stories, our myths and legends, if you like. We weave a kind of glorious, complex consensual reality. You can experience it in a fairly crude form by watching how consensus is reached by the media and the public over something like our action in Kosovo, where a story takes shape and that story convinces us to send our young men into war against the Serbs who were, for centuries, Christendom’s shield against Islam, her front-line troops, just as Israel is used by America in modern times. (Having traveled extensively amongst Arabs and Moslems of most persuasions, I don’t share these phobias about Islam, though I haven’t met too many pro-Jewish Arabs, either!)
Yesterday’s victims are tomorrow’s aggressors. As I wrote recently—the names of the people driven out of Ireland by the cruel cynicism of the English during the Great Famine are the same names on the lists of soldiers who shot down Native American women and children during the US
western expansion into so-called Indian territory. They were allowed to commit such atrocities because we were telling ourselves a different story, about our need to “civilize” and “help” these benighted descendants of the tribes we originally called “the civilized nations.” As with Africa, it’s our own actions which cause the collapse of other civilizations, which turn their people into “savages” whom we can then control and exploit. We can tell ourselves useful lies, but those lies are also the widening fault lines in any society, which can’t afford to be built on too many unlikely notions.
If lies are fault lines, for which we often pay many years later, then truths are what bind us securely and allow us to deal with the world more straightforwardly and therefore more effectively. So we can tell ourselves useful truths as well. We can take control of our own stories. We can create our own story. We can make that story closer to what our idealism wants it to be. It’s a collective power, a power we all contribute to. We, in the world’s democracies, have no excuse for not trying to improve things. If we aren’t satisfied with the story we’re in, we have the power to change it! Or at least modify it. That’s what my fantasy adventures are always about—taking charge of our own affairs, ridding our own personal worlds of gods and demons, of monarchs and tyrants.
I’m a very political animal, a Tom Paine democrat, and I think popular fiction can be about popular ideas, about our mutual idealism, the struggle between common sense and immovable orthodoxy, between individual liberty and authoritarianism, between human love and human stupidity. The eternal struggle, if you like, in which we all have a part!
The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino Page 2
